Category: Media

THE TWO RULES OF MODERN JOURNALISM:

RULE # 1: Because journalists are required to be open-minded, exercise independence of spirit, and display a healthy amount of skepticism, the words and deeds of politicians, leaders, and the powerful — as well as those of regular citizens being interviewed — must constantly be questioned, second-guessed, doubted, fact-checked, challenged, and, more often than not, interrupted (more or less politely).

RULE # 2: Rule # 1 only applies to Republicans.

For Democrats and leftists, the typical query is more along the lines of “pray enlighten us to your glorious plans for fundamentally transforming the United States of America (we will be quiet now).” (Close second: “kindly tell us how much people have suffered, and are still suffering, in this dreadful country of ours.”)

Duuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Politico Poll On Gun Ownership: Majority of Respondents Not Gun Owners

Digging into a poll on gun ownership by Politico and Morning Consult that was reported in The Hill produced an interesting revelation: Just over two-thirds of the participants say nobody in their household owns a gun of any kind.

So, when The Hill reported the results of this survey showed “Approximately 2 in 3 Americans…said that they support greater restrictions on gun ownership,” should this be taken with a proverbial grain of salt? The Hill said the survey had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

The Politico-Morning Consult poll was conducted April 9-12 and includes responses from 1,992 registered voters. But 1,327 of those respondents aren’t gun owners while only 665 said they live in a household where someone owns a firearm.

But could the imbalance between gun owners and non-gun owners have been at least partly responsible for the way the numbers and percentages on certain questions break down? Here are some results:

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If You’re Still Using Chrome, Google’s Latest Revelation Will Make You Stop

Earlier this year, Apple required developers to stick a “privacy nutritional label” on any applications they make available for download on the company’s massive App Store for iPhone and iPad.

There was just one catch: The label only had to be applied to new or newly updated apps.

Google, that great privacy-destroying machine, waited almost four months before updating their most popular app — the Chrome browser — and publishing the mandated privacy label along with it.

You knew it was going to be bad. You might not have known just how bad it was going to be.

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Everybody Here Hates the Media, and Everybody Owns a Gun

I’ve been writing a series for The Stream on the 2018 political hit job that tried to destroy me. No such retelling of that dark time would be complete without recalling the role played by my buddy “Rick.”

To recap: On September 16 2018, the Washington Post published a profile of Christine Blasey Ford. She claimed that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school in 1982. She said that I was in the room where the assault allegedly took place. The allegation roiled the nation.

The media mostly acted as if they were Ford’s hired publicists. She leaned, in turn, on an opposition researcher named Keith Koegler. According to The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, Koegler had

spent many hours that summer poring over news coverage of the nomination process, biographical information about Kavanaugh, and writings and videos produced by Mark Judge. In combing through YouTube, articles, and social networks, Koegler had learned more about the house parties … and the lexicon of 1980s Georgetown Prep than he had ever thought he would care to know.

I will recount this entire Salem witch-trial nightmare in a book I’m writing.

 

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That which does not fit or support the narrative must be erased!

Facebook Quickly Scrubs Capitol Assailant Noah Green’s Facebook Page Praising Farrakhan As Jesus.

Facebook quickly removed self-described “follower of Farrakhan” Noah Green’s profile page shortly after media identified him Friday as the assailant who was shot dead after driving into U.S. Capitol Police officers and lunging at them with a knife.

Describing himself on the since-deleted page as a follower of the Nation of Islam, the 25-year-old Green effusively praised the radical Farrakhan and his predecessor, Elijah Muhammad, as incarnations of Jesus Christ whose teachings changed his life.

Explaining the social media’s company’s reason for the deletion, a spokesperson for Facebook told The Daily Wire: “After this horrific event, our thoughts are with the Capitol Police and their loved ones. We have designated the incident under our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, which means we have removed the suspect’s accounts from Facebook and Instagram, and are removing any content that praises, supports, or represents the attack or the suspect. We are in contact with law enforcement as they conduct their investigation.”

According to the policy the spokesperson cited, Facebook does not allow anyone, living or dead, to maintain a presence on the platform if they are a mass murderer or if they attempt mass murder. “We consider an attempted mass murder to be one where an individual uses a weapon or vehicle to attempt mass harm in a public space or against more than one person,” the policy says.

As The Daily Wire noted, MSNBC’s Jesse Rodriguez tweeted reporting from NBC’s Pete Williams about Green’s identity at 3:43 p.m. Journalists Ian Miles Cheong and Andy Ngo scoured Green’s Facebook page almost immediately, taking screenshots and posting them to Twitter until 4:15 p.m., by which time Cheong reported that the page was gone. “Facebook just confirmed the identity of Noah Green by yeeting his page,” Cheong wrote. “It’s gone.”

It’s Important To Be Honest About What Today’s Media Actually Are.

“It’s time to stop acting like these political activists are professionals who do honest journalism. Continuing that pretense is not doing a favor to the public. It’s not true. With very few exceptions, these people are not there to do journalism, and we need to be honest about that with the public. Not everyone is as bad as everyone else, but nearly the entire press corps is somewhere on the Democrat activist scale, from lefty to fringe, from shrewd to clumsy and clownish.”

On Monday night, former President Donald Trump announced the launch of the official website of the 45th president of the United States, 45Office.com.

 

Some questions answer themselves, and these ⇓  are some of them.

Biden’s Gag Order on the Border Patrol.

So much for the new era of White House transparency, I suppose.

Why are we not seeing more outrage from the Washington Post, the New York Times or CNN?

Where are the complaints about the authoritarian muzzling of the media? Even as the major press outlets do manage to mention the situation, shouldn’t they be rebelling against this blackout?

Or is criticism of a Democratic administration still verboten to the point where most of them will quietly sit on their hands?

Dan Bongino to take over Rush Limbaugh’s radio time slot.

Cumulus Media’s Westwood One announced on Wednesday that Dan Bongino will be launching a new radio show during the time slot left vacant by conservative talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh.

The program, “The Dan Bongino Show,” will broadcast 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET in select markets starting May 24, including KABC Los Angeles, WLS Chicago, WBAP Dallas, KSFO San Francisco, and WMAL Washington, D.C.

BLUF:
“Just how many anonymously sourced stories are fraudulent? If it can happen this easily, who is to say it doesn’t happen often? Further, how many of these bogus stories have enjoyed the backing of supposed independent corroboration when, in fact, newsrooms most likely talked to the same person or people?”
President Trump got a lot of flak for calling the media the “enemy of the people.” But it seems like they’ve been doing a good job at proving Trump was right about them.

The Washington Post’s Fake Trump Quote Scandal Is a Lot Worse Than You Think

The media conspiracy against Trump became a lot more serious on Monday when the Washington Post retracted its January story claiming that President Donald Trump had pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find the fraud” in the 2020 election and said that he’d be a “national hero” if he did.

A recording of the call definitively proved that the quotes cited by the Washington Post, and then parroted by other outlets, were never actually said by the president.

But, as Becket Adams explains at the Washington Examiner, “the Washington Post’s dud of a ‘bombshell’ isn’t even the most scandalous thing about this episode in media malfeasance.”

The most scandalous thing, Adams, argues, is that several different newsrooms “claimed they independently ‘confirmed’ the original ‘scoop’ with anonymous sources of their own.”

NBC News reported it “confirmed The Post’s characterization of the Dec. 23 call through a source familiar with the conversation.”

USA Today claimed a “Georgia official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters confirmed the details of the call.”

ABC News reported: “President Donald Trump phoned a chief investigator in Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office asking the official to ‘find the fraud’ and telling this person they would be a ‘national hero’ for it, an individual familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News.”

PBS NewsHour and CNN likewise appeared to claim they independently “confirmed” the story through their own anonymous sources.

The Washington Post claimed its quotes were confirmed by an anonymous source, and at least five major news outlets claimed to have independently confirmed that Trump said things he never said. “The most likely scenario is ABC, the Washington Post, and others talked to the same person or group,” theorizes Adams. “It’s either that or a bunch of people managed somehow to be wrong about a very specific claim, which is highly unlikely.”

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Washington Post Admits Trump’s ‘Find the Fraud’ Quote Was Fake News

The Washington Post has issued a correction to a January 9 story in which it claimed that then-President Donald Trump had told a Georgia state elections investigator to “find the fraud.” In fact, an audio recording showed Trump said no such thing.

The Post‘s original article was headlined: “‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.” It relied on information from a single anonymous source, described as “an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.”

Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

The Washington Examiner reported on Sunday evening:

The Wall Street Journal first published audio last week of the roughly six-minute call on Dec. 23 between Trump and Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, in which Trump urged her to look for fraud in mail-in ballots in Fulton County, where much of Atlanta is located.

…

[T]he audio shows that early reports in January about that call, based on anonymous sourcing, misquoted Trump. In those reports, Trump was quoted as urging Watson to “find the fraud,” and if she did so, the investigator would be a “national hero.”

Outlets such as CNN published these quotes, corroborating what was first reported by the Washington Post. While CNN’s version, reliant on a single anonymous source, remains unchanged, the Washington Post stuck a long correction note to the top of its report …

Both CNN and the Washington Post reported previously that state officials said they did not believe a recording of the Trump-Watson call existed, but in recent days both have new reports that say officials found the recording in Watson’s trash folder on her device while responding to a public records request.

Democrats used the phony “find the fraud” quote in the Senate impeachment trial of former President Trump last month.

De Jure and De Facto Censorship: Why We Need to Be Concerned About Both.

The last few weeks have seen dustups over the decision by the foundation overseeing Dr. Seuss’s works (i.e. Dr. Seuss Enterprises) to cease publication of six books deemed problematic, as well as claims that the old Pepé Le Pew cartoon leads to rape culture. These recent incidents add to what appears to be an increasing effort to restrict the availability of controversial books, TV shows and other fictional media, as well as access to social media. These come mostly from non-governmental producers and distributors of such content, often in the context of campaigns of moral outrage playing out on social media. Do these steps amount to censorships or bannings? This question has caused considerable debate and confusion, but it helps us understand what we mean by censorship. It is not uncommon for people to claim, for instance, that Target banning sales of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage or the Seuss foundation’s decision no longer to sell six of his books are basically nothing to worry about, because these decisions were made by private entities, not by government. We are also assured that these decisions don’t really amount to censorship because the materials are still available if people really wish to find them.

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BLUF:
Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.

Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse.
As social media empowers uncredentialed people to be heard, society’s most powerful actors seek to cast themselves as victims and delegitimize all critiques.

The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).

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Providing confirmation, and self identification (it’s nice when they do intelligence gathering work for you, isn’t it?) that universities are domestic enemy institutions that must eventually be eliminated in self defense.

Top digital journalism professor at Columbia calls for censorship of conservative media.

The top digital journalism professor at Columbia University recently called for some center-right news outlets to be censored in the name of cracking down on misinformation.

Professor Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Media, said it is not an infringement of the First Amendment to audit and vet some news outlets to promote a “truthful news environment.”

She made the comments in response to concerns among U.S. Reps. Jerry McNerney and Anna Eshoo, who sent letters to a multitude of streaming companies, including AT&T, Verizon, Roku, Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Charter, Dish, Cox and Hulu, asking them about censoring “misinformation” in the conservative media.

The Democratic senior members expressed that “right-wing media ecosystem[s]” like “Newsmax, One America News Network (OANN), and Fox News” must be held accountable for supposed fallacies on their networks and suggested they be booted from these venues.

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Noop. Even after they learn this, they don’t get to lecture anyone.

14 Things Everyone Should Understand About Guns
Guns aren’t that complicated. Learn a little bit about them before lecturing other people about gun safety.

Guns can be dangerous in the wrong hands. But so are articles about guns written by people who don’t understand anything about them.

There’s sadly no excuse to be ignorant about firearms. They’ve been around for hundreds of years. They’re owned and operated safely by tens of millions of Americans each year. Our Constitution guarantees our individual right to possess guns so that we might be able to defend ourselves from those who would violently take away our freedom. Many gun controllers, however — some of whom have bylines for major media organizations — don’t actually know the first thing about firearms.

Here’s a good example of the kind of self-inflicted injury that can result from weaponizing an ill-informed opinion about guns and gun-related paraphernalia, courtesy of Ryan J. Reilly of Huffington Post:

Unfortunately, Reilly is hardly alone in his complete ignorance of how guns work. Our nation is facing an epidemic of gun-related misreporting. As a public service to those who have opinions about guns but don’t really want to spend much time learning anything about them, I’ve compiled a simple list of 14 basic things everyone should understand before writing or talking about guns.

1) Don’t Lecture Anyone On Gun Safety Until You Understand The Basic Rules

These are rules literally every person should understand, because you never know when you might be in a situation that requires you to handle a firearm. To seasoned gun owners, these basic gun safety rules are gospel. If faithfully followed, they will prevent the likelihood of you ever shooting someone who did not pose an immediate and mortal threat to an innocent person.

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Social media censorship legislation proposed in Kansas

A social media censorship bill, targeting companies like Facebook and Twitter that have been censoring and de-platforming conservative viewpoints, is being considered in Kansas.

According to Dr. Mark Steffen, the Republican State Senator from Hutchinson who is sponsoring the bill, his measure takes a unique approach to work around the Section 230 federal protections social media companies enjoy.

The Social Media Anti-Censorship Bill” SB187 targets the terms of service everyone agrees to — generally without having read them — when they create an account, under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act.

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TV Shows Push Gun Control Myths — in Sync With Biden

Last week, the Biden administration promised gun control groups that it will soon roll out a massive push for limits on firearm purchases and other measures. President Biden reiterated that promise on Sunday. And the television networks aren’t waiting to lay the groundwork for this effort.

CBS is in a full-court press for gun control on its evening entertainment television shows. The bad guys are always white supremacists who use machine guns — supposedly AR-15s — to commit mass public shootings. Criminals in Mexico supposedly get machine guns from the United States. A father’s desire to protect his family only leads to tragedy when his daughter gets into the gun safe and uses the weapon in a mass public shooting. And guns in the home pose a danger for children. Gun registration is necessary for solving crime.

NBC isn’t to be left out, showing a woman who tried but failed to use a gun to protect herself. Instead, her gun was taken from her and used to kill a police officer. The lesson is that owning a gun will only bring you grief.

And that’s just in the first six weeks of the year. Every show gives an inaccurate impression about firearms, thereby helping in this push for gun restrictions. It’s as though these shows were written by Michael Bloomberg’s gun control organizations. Indeed, the networks are working with these groups. A member of  Moms Demand Action recently wrote a Washington Post op-ed headlined: “Guns are white supremacy’s deadliest weapon. We must disarm hate.” So it isn’t too surprising that show after show portrays neo-Nazis using machine guns to commit mass public shootings. CBS’s “SWAT,” “FBI: Most Wanted,” “FBI,” and” Bull” all push this theme. They often refer explicitly to these guns as AR-15s. Others, such as “Magnum PI” and “NCIS LA,” constantly show criminals using machine guns.

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Rush Limbaugh – and the Importance of Being Hated

James O’Keefe——-

It is with great sadness that I learned my dear friend, inspirational figure, and American radio icon Rush Limbaugh has passed away.

I will never forget what Rush said when someone once asked him about how he handled being hated:

There’s a good reason for the media hating me.  And once I came to grips with that fact, that there’s a reason they should hate me, then it makes sense.  One of the toughest things I had to do was learn to psychologically accept the fact that being hated was a sign of success. 

Most people aren’t raised to be hated.  We’re all raised to be loved.  We want to be loved.  We’re told to do things to be loved and appreciated and liked.  We’re raised, don’t offend anybody, be nice.  Everybody wants total acceptance. Everybody wants respect. Everybody wants to be loved, and so when you learn that what you do is going to engender hatred you have to learn to accept that as a sign of success.  That was a tough psychological thing for me.

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In Must-Watch Clip, Trump Attorney “Michael van der Veen, Citizen” Destroys Media

Saturday night, President Trump’s attorney, Michael van der Veen, appeared on CBS News and was asked about Sen. Mitch McConnell’s comments after Trump’s acquittal. As Bonchie covered earlier, McConnell said that “President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” and that Trump is “still liable for everything he did during his period in office.” When he was specifically asked whether he was surprised to hear such a serious rebuke from the leader of the Republican party in the Senate, van der Veen’s expression, tone, and words said it all.

I’m not surprised to hear a politician say anything at all. No.

Crickets. The CBS News anchor, Lana Zak, wasn’t quite sure what to make of the reply. She decided to move forward and attempt to “gotcha” van der Veen, and it doesn’t go well for her at all. This, like Friday’s supercut of Democrats inciting violence, is a must-watch clip for two reasons: one, it’s rare that someone so articulately calls out the media, and two, it’s rare that the media have a guest they’re afraid to just cut off as they speak “their truth.”

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